When it comes to Oscar’s best international film category, Moroccan author-director Maryam Touzani has a remarkable track record. Over the past eight years, she has directed two of Morocco’s Oscar posts, the first woman who governs the country’s entry into that race; She has written three of the other five records, all directed by her husband, Nabil Ayouch; And she has also played in one of them, Ayouch’s drama 2017 “Razzia.”
So even before Touzani’s new film, “Calle Malaga,” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, you would be hard pressed to bet that she landed another movie in the Oscar race. And when “Calle Malaga” was shown in Venice, these odds probably got even better. The film takes a situation that can be milked for varying drama and upset, an older woman whose daughter tries to sell her mother’s long -lasting home under her and treats it with ease and charm.
With the essential help of the legendary Spanish actress Carmen Maura (“Women on the border of a nervous division”, “Volver”), Touzani creates an indelible character, has a lot of fun with her and makes a truly audience-committed movie that somehow withdraws before it becomes too happy or for cheese.
It is easier than you can expect from the director whose two most recent films handled a terminally ill woman facing the fact that her husband was gay (“The Blue Caftan”) and a widow baker who takes in an unmarried pregnant woman (“Adam”). But Maura is closely irresistible and helps “Calle Malaga” float when it knew Cloy.
Maura plays Maria Angeles, a Spanish-Moroccan widow who lives in Tangier in the home that her deceased husband bought for them years ago. An opening scene for doing her morning shopping rounds shows Maria as an integral part of a lively society, whose residents easily slide between Arabic and Spanish. (Touzani grew up there and is of Moroccan and Spanish descent.)
When her daughter arrives on a rare visit in the middle of a nasty divorce, the young woman seems bad until she finally loses the bomb. “I need some money, mom,” she says. “I’ll sell the apartment.”
“I thought it was a rent,” says Maria.
“I mean this flat.”
“You will sell my House?”
And yes, it is the plan, for the apartment was put in the daughter’s name by Mary’s deceased husband, who wanted to make it easier for his wife in the event of his death. The daughter has two options for Maria: Move to Madrid and live with her, or enter a pension society in Tangier that has a single opening available if she moves directly.
Mary protests hard and then suddenly undermines humbly; Her daughter apparently does not know her mother good enough to realize that there is something that is up, but even this early in the movie we know in the audience. Maria lives in the pension society for a few days and then tells them that she decided to move to Madrid to be with her daughter. She signs herself and her friend Mbarek comes to pick her up.
“Airport?” he asks when she puts her bags in the car.
“Do you pull your leg?” She is snapped. “You take me Home. “
And surprisingly she pulls it easily. The apartment has not sold yet, and Maria manages to come in again, buy back some of her furniture from the acidic antique dealer who gave her daughter a stone bottom prize for everything. (She also blackmails the real estate agent from revealing what she does, but we will not destroy the details of it.)
The film sketches the lively life of society, and Maria charms the audience as well as she charmes the people around her. Although we know that she cannot get away with it indefinitely, Touzani’s insistence on trivializing trauma and emphasizing the joy (and even romance, since the antiquity dealer turns out to be such a bastard after all) feels like a real statement: she will take a 79-year-old woman in a desperate situation.
The role of a Feisty older woman can easily become a Mawkian cliché, but Maura submits it and makes her touch but never Maudlin. So the sweet moments come one by one, because Maria calculates a (not entirely legal) way to make money, takes over her sexual adventures with her best friend, who happens to be a nun, and to all performances ignore the bill that must come when the apartment sells.
Of course, she doesn’t really ignore it, nor the audience. And even then Touzani finds a way out of history that is ambiguous but satisfactory, and one who does not betray neither the character we love nor the situation she is in.
“Calle Malaga” is a sensitive movie to deduct, but Touzani and Maura find the right balance from the beginning. You don’t know that everything will be ok at the end of the movie, but you know that everything has been more than ok during the two hours you’ve seen.
